Look Back With Pride At V-e Day

May 8, 1985

HITLER DIED while defending Berlin against the Russian army, the German radio service announced on May 1, 1945. Although that account wasn`t fully accurate -- it`s believed Hitler and his wife committed suicide -- it marked the end of any consistent German resistance to the Allied armies in World War II.

The remaining Nazi leaders sought a piecemeal peace in which German troops would surrender to the Western allies but not to the Russians, but Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower rejected that approach. It violated an agreement among the Allies.

So at 2:41 a.m. on May 7, 1945, in a schoolhouse in Reims, France, German Gen. Alfred Jodl signed the official and unconditional surrender. The next day, May 8, was designated by the Allied chiefs of staff as V-E (Victory in Europe) Day.

Forty years later we Americans celebrate that victory in a muted fashion. We honor those American and other Allied soldiers who died while squashing the Nazi war machine.

Our president journeys to West Germany and takes a ``painful walk into the past`` at a former concentration camp. At the Bitburg cemetery, he strikes a note of reconciliation between former enemies as he tries, and partially succeeds, in overcoming the planning blunders preceding his trip.

We consider West Germany an ally and East Germany an adversary. The wartime alliance, an alliance of necessity more than ideological agreement, is just a memory; the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact cohorts operate behind what Winston Churchill aptly named an Iron Curtain.

In so many important aspects, it`s a different and more frightening world, requiring restraint and wisdom in controlling the nuclear arsenal. Yet the traditional American abhorrence of totalitarianism, which compelled America to fight Hitler, has not diminished.

One abiding truth emerged again from the horrors of WWII, a truth that has often characterized the American nation: When totalitarianism must be crushed, and other free nations can`t accomplish it, the Americans will do their best to get the job done.

It is quite true that the British fought valiantly and for a time virtually alone against the Hitler menace. It is quite true that the immense Russian contribution to the war effort was vital. And it is true that soldiers of many other nations perished in the cause of freedom.

Without U.S. determination and power, however, it is highly uncertain that Hitler`s cancer would have been excised from Europe.

America`s battle against totalitarianism sometimes isn`t handled well, as in Vietnam, and sometimes this nation is slow to fully recognize a significant threat to freedom, as in Cuba and Nicaragua.

Yet when the menace is clear and immediate, as it was from Hitler`s Germany, America acts firmly to preserve liberty.

Hitler called his conquered empire Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), but America and its allies destroyed it.

And the despicable Third Reich, which Hitler predicted would last for a thousand years, died unmourned at age 22.